Details

Description

sort's docstring does not address whether the sort will be stable.

Stability is a useful property. It appears to be customary among programming tools to document whether their sort is stable. Java's Collections javadoc pledges a stable sort. The man-page of GNU coreutils sort in Ubuntu mentions its stability. The perldoc of Perl's sort function indicates it is a stable sort now but was not always.

(2) In a 2011 discussion thread, "Clojure sort: is it specified to be stable for all targets?" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/j3aNAmEJW9A , Stuart Sierra replied that "if it's not specified in the doc string, then it's not a promise. That said, [...] I would generally expect a language built-in `sort` routine to be stable, so take that for what it's worth."